The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Culver City, California

"Is this place real or what?"

"It's here, isn't it?"

--Conversation overheard at the MJT, October 2000

Imagine a world where Auguste Comte had never formulated his positivist philosophy of knowledge based on observing facts and deriving laws. Or where Isaac Newton's mysticism and his calculus were not sharply distinguished, but rather seen as complementary parts of a holistic conception of life. Or spare yourself such mental exercises and walk into the Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT), a liminal space tucked into a storefront on the west side of Los Angeles (fig. 1). Familiar tropes of museum practice greet the visitor: the banner out front, the imposing sign with gilded letters above the entry, the arch politesse of the behavioral cues ("Ring buzzer once for admittance"). At the small entry desk, visitors are met by a pleasant and seemingly preoccupied staff member. Sometimes the staffer is David Wilson, the principal creator of MJT and a recent MacArthur Fellow.

Wilson's singular vision is explored in a 1995 book by Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders. Weschler delved into the protean irony of the museum's name and found a variety of references both geographical (a map that locates "the Jurassic" about where most maps place Egypt) and chronological (a comparison with other collections characterized as "Devonian" and "Eocene"). The museum's logo uses the superscript line, signifying negation, over the letters symbolizing canonical thinkers: non-Aristotelian, non-Euclidean, non-Newtonian. At the time of the book's publication, the MJT was surviving on a combination of admission fees, a few grants, and modest donations. Partly thanks to the book, the museum's audience appears to have grown. Three years ago the MJT was threatened with the loss of its space and responded by raising money to buy the building. About half of the needed one million dollars has been obtained from a combination of grants and donations. ¹

Past the entryway, a dimly lit maze of galleries occupies a few thousand square feet in all. The first sights to greet the visitor include a meticulously rendered cutaway model of Noah's ark (fig. 2), presented with the bland authority of a traditional temple of learning. Silkscreened on an adjacent wall is a passage that might serve as the mission statement for the museum: "The learner must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar . . . guided along, as it were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life." Its purpose thus declared, the MJT guides the visitor through a critique of Western thought since the Renaissance, especially of the great divides between objective materialism and the subjective mind and between the realm of quantifiable science and the dominion of spirituality and belief.

When it opened a little more than a decade ago, the MJT featured an orientation slide show, a half-dozen dioramas, and smaller exhibits in wall cases and vitrines. Since then it has expanded into the back rooms of the adjacent commercial spaces to add four more galleries and a reading room. The exhibits are skillfully constructed. Miniature habitats match the artfulness of dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History, and the shadow-boxed objects and backlit graphics employ all the artifice of the up-to-date museum designer and fabricator. The labels are complete with elaborate citations to volumes, editions, and translations that all seem quite plausible--and might be, or might not.

Weschler attempted to find the precise point at which the stories in these exhibits departed from proven fact, but reality proved a fleeting quarry. Some of the stories did not pan out, such as the Deprong Mori (fig. 3), the South American bat with sonic transmission capacities that allow it to penetrate a wall of lead--although the biologist whom Weschler tracked down for an authoritative opinion of the matter did observe that fifty years ago...